Many businesses give cell phones to their employees for business usage. The IT department wants to keep track of which software version is installed in each phone and what types of phones are in the hands of their employees. They want to know this for compatibility of ugrades to the phones and to know which phones, if any, need upgrades or to which new software can be downloaded. The company may also want to monitor usage of the phones so as to allocate budget usage amounts to its various departments. It may also want to monitor usage to make sure most usage is business related.
As far as the inventor is aware, the prior art has no convenient solution to this problem. Currently, the company will get multiple paper cell phone bills, each indicating the cell phone number of the phone being used and the phone numbers called and the minutes consumed. No indication of the phone's software version or make and model is included on these bills. No indication of which phone number is assigned to each department is included on these bills. The IT department would have to manually look up the software and hardware version for each phone and would have to determine manually from paper records which phones are assigned to which employees and which departments they are in. Then, the accounting department would have to group the bills into groups by department manually and add up the usage minutes manually. All this is time consuming and labor intensive and not attractive to IT departments or accounting departments of big and medium size companies.
Further, these bills come to the company on a monthly basis, and are not available on an as-needed, when-needed basis.
Accordingly, a need has arisen to gather information electronically from the phones themselves and collect and store that information in a database such that further inquiries can be made by mining the data in the database. Preferably, the information will be gathered on an as-needed, when-needed basis.